An American nun who wrote a book about sex that praised female masturbation has been accused of promoting a "radical feminist agenda" by officials of the Catholic Church, an organization that knowingly and willfully protected pedophile priests from prosecution and is the proprietor of a bank that's US officials have placed on a Money Laundering Concern List. Oboedientia et Hypocrisy.

In 2006, Sister Margaret Farley's Just Love, a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics was published, and it's since established itself as a fixture in the canon of religious writing that doesn't make a reasonable, compassionate person want to tie herself to a tree and invite passers by to shoot her with arrows. Among the tenets of the book, according to Raw Story: praise for female masturbation — "(women) have found great good in self-pleasuring – perhaps especially in the discovery of their own possibilities for pleasure – something many had not experienced or even known about in their ordinary sexual relations with husbands or lovers." Jill off, my children. In addition to condoning taco tickling, Farley's book noted that gay relationships are just fine, and divorce is unfortunate but occasionally necessary.

As it tends to do whenever a woman expresses a progressive opinion, the Vatican balked/shat the pants it wears under its robes at Farley's book, yesterday releasing a statement barring Catholic educators from using it. The Church clarified that female masturbation isn't okay; it's a "gravely disordered action" (like pedophilia, except with masturbation, the people involved in the sex act enjoy it! Rimshot! I'll be here all week.) And homosexuality is an "act of grave depravity," and divorce is "contravening God's law."

Farley herself is a professor emeritus of Christian ethics at Yale, and was immediately defended by American nuns and Catholic academics. In her own defense, she acknowledged that her book addressed issues that veered from the traditional teachings of the Catholic Church, but that it was supposed to demonstrate that even those issues could be addressed from a Christian-based ethical perspective.

This Vatican's been busy fighting American nuns hard this year, claiming that they'd broken completely from the Church and were promoting a "radical feminist agenda." To be fair, though, everything that isn't directly in line with the Church's teachings is a "radical feminist agenda," according to the Church. But when I read "radical," I like to think of it like how the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles meant it as a synonym for "totally cool." Imagining Pope Benedict flashing a thumbs up and telling American nuns that they're way awesome/tubular makes this whole saga less headache-inducing.